In contrast to online shopping environments, brick-and-mortar stores and other real-world shopping venues lack means to readily determine that customers are visiting a location with a group such as family members or friends. As a result, real-world shopping venues are unable to personalize shopping experiences and tailor content for visitors based on who the visitors are shopping with in the venue. Efficient tailoring of content for such visitors can increase visitor responsiveness to products presented to the visitors while the visitors are in the real-world venue (e.g., while the visitor is shopping in a store with family members). Hence, tailoring content for visitors is very important to marketers and venue operators.
Shopping is often a family activity. However, stores are often unable to provide a family-friendly or couple-friendly shopping experience because retailers lack sufficient information to enhance the experience for couples and families visiting their stores. For example, a visitor to a store may only go to the store's home appliance section when the visitor is shopping in the store with his family members. It is desirable to personalize content sent to mobile device of such a visitor in order to promote home appliances while the visitor is in the store with his family. However, existing techniques cannot determine that the visitor is in the store with his family. Hence, determining who a visitor is shopping with in a store is important to retailers.
In a real-world shopping venue, such as a brick-and-mortar store, a person's behavior can be different when he is shopping alone compared to when he is shopping in the venue with a group such as family members, friends, or colleagues. Visitors, patrons, customers, shoppers, guests, and other visitors to a real-world venue may behave differently based on the company they are with at the venue. For example, a visitor who has a health ailment may only buy medicine from a drugstore or pharmacy when he is shopping alone. Also, for example, if a visitor goes to a venue such as a restaurant with a financially conservative co-worker, the visitor may order conservatively, whereas when the visitor goes to a restaurant with his spouse, the visitor may spend more lavishly. Similarly, a visitor may order non-vegetarian meals when he is at a restaurant with his co-workers, but may order vegetarian meals when he is with a parent.
While marketers often devote significant resources to analyzing a visitor's online activities and creating a detailed digital marketing profile for website visitors based on such analysis, less attention has been devoted to analyzing activities of people present in real-world venues such as visitors to brick-and-mortar stores. One reason for this is the fact that the visitor's offline activities often do not involve direct interaction with a computer system, thus making such activities more difficult to observe, track, record, and analyze. Mobile computing devices, such as smartphones, may provide some insight into a website visitor's location while conducting certain online activities, but even this information is limited to interactions between the visitor and the smartphone. Such information generally does not, for example, accurately reflect offline interactions such as a family visit to a store in order to shop together. A visitor profile that fails to adequately represent the visitor's offline activities will not be as accurate as a more comprehensive profile, and therefore will not allow a marketer to tailor content for the visitor as effectively. Furthermore, a visitor profile that is based only on online activities will be less valuable to a marketer who wishes to target the visitor in an offline context, for example, as the visitor shops in a retail outlet. Existing digital marketing profiles therefore omit substantial, and potentially valuable, portions of a visitor's activity. This is especially problematic given that retail sales still overwhelmingly occur offline, and further given that offline activities often significantly influence online purchase decisions. This prevents marketers from effectively targeting visitors in both online and offline environments.
Existing techniques and platforms for audience management are not equipped to personalize experiences for visitors to a venue based on their current company in the venue. Thus, there is a need for systems that tailor content for a visitor based on who that visitor is currently with in order to take advantage of the fact that the visitor's behavior is different when he is alone compared to when he is with family members, friends, or colleagues.